Optimize Your Online Store With a Tint of Personal Touch

With the evolution of Business intelligence and artificial intelligence although the manual intervention has reduced, but each of us still believe and crave to get personal touch to the offerings made to us. Wouldn’t you love a personal touch? The recent ad of ICICI bank featuring amitabh bachan really touches your heart, where all sorts of people pick their favorite picture and get it printed on their ICICI debit/credit card. A very simple idea but it impacts the mass.

What it means with Personal Touch?

A personal touch or user customization basically means that user is allowed to alter or choose from the products offered. Just for eg , as a customer you usually go to a restaurant frequently. The manager out there knows your needs and address accordingly say that you need gravy with more spice or the soup to be served as lukewarm. These kind of personal services make the customer to go again and again to the same place.

Check out this email personalization on PriceTree welcome email

From business perspective, the owners have an advantage of “returning customers” and in turn these returning customers could bring in more referrals to their business. So it’s a win-win for both the parties.

How an e-commerce platform can get hitched to Customer Personal Needs

Acquire Data

For every valuable customer, before moving on “how” we should be tackling “what customer needs” and this could only be gathered from data. To obtain data, as a business owner you can work on any of these areas –

1. Allow user to create wish list - A wish list for an e-commerce platform is must to have feature. Reason is quite simple, we all know people have “infinite” desires but due to some or the other reason people keep them postponing and hence a wish list gives a picture of what customer is looking for may be in near future or just to keep a track of it, if price is reduced may be he/she buys it.
2. Get “what all has already been bought by a particular customer” from your store/website – So, this should be easy, previously sold articles gives a clear indication of what are the interest of the customer. Say I got a book of Jeffrey Archer Volume 1, and once Volume 2 is about to hit markets, I could inform my customer that the Volume 2 is available and you could buy it from same site.
3. A Feedback memo from customer stating their likes and dislikes - As a customer, I hate any feedback forms and moreover why should I fill in as I’m not getting anything out it. So getting customers to fill in feedback form is bit tricky. May be you can give away some “brownie points” or a surprise gift or you need to convince them, that it’s for your own benefit and once you have the information, you are ready to go.
4. Collecting important Dates – Adding customers birthday, anniversary dates to your database could help you in again short listing the offers as per the customer needs and mail them. See this Infographic for personalization

Working On Data Analytics

Once we have the data, structure it out good and bad data and then analyze and work on the data. There are many data analytics tools available out in the market to help you, or otherwise even MS excel could help you in building charts, sorting the data and hitting the nail out of it.

There are many ways in which this data analytics could be use as per the customer base you guys own, just for eg –

1. Dashboard – If your site buys/sells lots of categories a bar chart displaying how was the spending last month in different categories could help the customer in planning further.
2. Offers Missed – Based on the previously purchased items list, you can also display the offers on some of the items which were missed
3. A personalized message – Say it on birthdays or anniversaries , when they login into your account they get a surprise message from you guys or you can credit some points to their account and ask them to shop for say 1000 and get additional 10% off

Adding Personal Touch

So we acquired the data and analyzed it as well, what next? Its not always about sending mails or offers to the customers, there is more to it. Let’s have a quick look on how to add a personal touch to selling –

1. A weekly newsletter, designed by customer themselves on what products they like, for which they like to hear from you – Allow customer to set their own customized offers/products mail in their inbox, rather than you doing it for them. As nobody knows the other person better than himself. Just for eg : naukri.com or timesjobs.com , allow user to set their own job search criteria and deliver them to the jobseeker inbox, and customer always have an option to turn it off. This gives them as sense of control and dominance, rather than you spamming their inbox, they design and do it for themselves.
2. A personal relationship manager may be for elite clients – The word “elite” does it rings a bell. Yes, special treatment who wouldn’t love it? I remember , during our anniversary when we were dining out , one of chef with a big bowl came to us –

   Sir, this is fresh potato wedges especially for you, cooked with “some” toppings, which you would definitely love it. And I could say just a Yes to him.

   And then he turned to my neighboring table. So he was doing this for all tables but making sure the person in front of him believes that it’s just for you.
3. Gift Wrapping Option – Yes, many e-commerce sites are offering that option, but to add more how about you uploading a picture, they take a print of it and that’s used as a gift wrapper?
4. Try it Out – Many e-commerce website are already providing that option of trial at home, which again is based on the fact that customer need a feel of it before buying the stuff
5. A freebie with JUST FOR YOU tag always have catchers – The offers and products sold would not work unless you have something offered for free. A free gift is always catchy to customers and could lift sales up, but again a unique gift with just for you tag

To Wrap Up

No matter how much we get virtual. We are humans and always would crave to get the personal space in the crowd and that’s what all e-commerce platform need to take an advantage of the human tendency. So now’s the time to implement, to take an action and see that sales reach on the top.